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Talk about Adafruit Raspberry Pi® accessories! Please do not ask for Linux support, this is for Adafruit products only! For Raspberry Pi help please visit: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/

Is there a Windows terminal emulator you can suggest for using AdaFruit's USB-to-Serial console cable....one that is freely available?The ZOC software suggested in the Tutorial works fine (30-days free), but $80 to connect to a $35 computer?

I tried Cygwin's X-term, MochaSoft's Telnet, and Console2 from SourceForge. But I haven't figured out how to connect them to the Com4 port that the cable driver comes up at. I guess these are really Telnet programs, and I need a Terminal Emulator.

PuttyTel Serial config should work, I'd think, but I had difficulty there too. Your suggestions are welcome.

putty should work OK, though I found it a bit confusing to set up.Bray's "Terminal" is highly recommended: https://sites.google.com/site/terminalbpp/You should be able to copy hyperterminal from a windows XP system...

I had a great terminal emulator, way back when. I was gonna get rich competing with Crosstalk V1 (well, beating them to market, actually); Blindingly fast with great features, fit on a 360k floppy and ran in 64k of memory, IIRC. All x86 assembly language.Instead I got a lesson in software publishing and legal issues :-(

Since you brought up the serial subject.... is there any way to open the the notepad from putty terminal? I know if you do "sudo nano /XXX/XXX/xx.py " it will let you open the file for editing inside the terminal. Is it possible for a "pop up" of the text editor to come up and let's you edit the file?like open a program from terminal? OR "remote desktop" through serial?thank you and am sorry if it is a stupid question. I am just trying to figure out a way to run headless at school where the computers have putty installed.

holaparc, no when you're talking to the console over the usb-to-serial cable you're just transferring individual characters back and forth one at a time. You can't open or control any window. You need a video display into the hdmi or video port and then start up the windows system.

Once you've got windows working, if you opened a terminal window within it, from that command line, you could use nano or vim to edit a file as if on the console. Or you could start a visual editor, and the windows system would gladly pop up a new window with the editor in it.

I know you asked for windows, but...honestly... try running some Debian linux on the PC. Windows terminals are always fiddly broken junkware. I can't believe people ask money for this garbage.

You will have decent terminal built-in and a relatively maintenance-free tool chain for your python, avr-gcc, and other development tools. This stuff really comes in handy when you want to use avr-dude to program other microcontrollers besides the one sitting in your Ardiuino board. Unless you can't handle typing apt-get upgrade/update every once in a while.

Also, with linux you will have alternatives to massively bloated development tools like Processing and the Arduino IDE. (Three or four lines of a shell script calling awk/gnuplot can often do the same thing as pages and pages of Processing java bloat. (Specifically, I'm thinking of the mightohm geiger counter graphing program. Hell, with <10 lines of script you can even make you a histogram and watch the Poisson distribution grow as the counts trickle in.)) The point is, /dev/ttyUSB0 is just a file and awk/sed/bash/python/perl/gnuplot/octave or anything you are comfortable with can read/write to it. The boring terminal emulation is built-in and preinstalled. But the initial learning is pretty tough at first.

I tried Cygwin's X-term, MochaSoft's Telnet, and Console2 from SourceForge. But I haven't figured out how to connect them to the Com4 port that the cable driver comes up at. I guess these are really Telnet programs, and I need a Terminal Emulator.

Have you looked in the /dev directory for tty files in cygwin'? There should be a file ttyUSBsomething or tty.cuSomething representing your USB serial port. You should be able to log into your rPi by running something like:

in an xterm. But I hear you, cygwin is a pretty achy-breaky linux. You might have to apt-get install screen, if it is not preinstalled. (btw, screen can do a LOT more than just talk to a serial port.) In any case, better to dual boot and use the real thing than waste time fighting with perpetually broken emulation...or whatever cygwin is.